Please answer the following questions by deciding to
what extent each item is characteristic of your feelings
and behavior. Fill in the blank next to each item by choosing
a number from the scale printed below.

1. I can become entirely absorbed in thinking
about my personal affairs, my health, my cares or my relations
to others.

2. My feelings are easily hurt by ridicule or the slighting
remarks of others.

3. When I enter a room I often become self-conscious and
feel that the eyes of others are upon me.

4. I dislike sharing the credit of an achievement with
others.

5. I feel that I have enough on my hands without worrying
about other people's troubles.

6. I feel that I am temperamentally different from most
people.

7. I often interpret the remarks of others in a personal
way.

8. I easily become wrapped up in my own interests and
forget the existence of others.

9. I dislike being with a group unless I know that I
am appreciated by at least one of those present.

10. I am secretly "put out" or annoyed when
other people come to me with their troubles, asking me
for my time and sympathy.

Abstract:

A new measure of hypersensitive narcissism
was derived by correlating the items of H. A. Murray's
(1938) Narcism Scale with an MMPI-based composite
measure of covert narcissism. In three samples
of college students (total N = 303), 10 items formed a
reliable
measure: the Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale (HSNS).
The new HSNS and the MMPI-based composite showed
similar patterns of correlations with the Big Five Inventory,
and both measures correlated near zero with the
Narcissistic
Personality Inventory, which assesses overt narcissism.
Results support the theoretical distinction between
covert and overt narcissistic tendencies in the
normal range of individual differences and suggest that
it would
be beneficial for personality researchers to measure
both types of narcissism in future studies.

Scale Characteristics:

There were 10 items which had significantly positive correlations
with the composite measure of covert narcissism in both samples. These
10 items formed a reliable scale which we named the Hypersensitive Narcissism
Scale (HSNS; alpha = .72 for Sample 1 of 109 college women, M = 28.7, SD = 6.2; alpha = .75 for Sample 2 of 151 college women, M = 29.7, SD = 6.1;
alpha = .62 for Sample 3 of 143 college men, M = 29.3 SD = 4.7). Because
the alpha for the male participants in Sample 3 was relatively low, we
also scored the new HSNS in another group of 101 college males from Cheek
and Melchior's (1985) data, who had completed Murray's Narcism Scale, but
not the NPI, and obtained a mean of 29.8, a standard deviation of 6.0,
and an alpha of .76.